When migrating virtual machines from Oracle VirtualBox to VMware Workstation, Fusion, or ESXi, virtual disk formats must be converted to VMware’s native format (VMDK).

There are two primary methods to accomplish this: using the universal qemu-img utility or VirtualBox’s native VBoxManage CLI tool.

qemu-img is a versatile disk management tool capable of converting between raw, qcow2, VMDK, VDI, and VHD/VPC images.

Installation

On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install -y qemu-utils

On Fedora/RHEL/CentOS:

sudo dnf install -y qemu-img

Converting VHD to VMDK

To convert a Virtual Hard Disk (.vhd / Microsoft VPC format) to VMware format:

qemu-img convert -f vpc -O vmdk systemdisk.vhd systemdisk.vmdk
  • -f vpc: Specifies the input format (vpc represents .vhd).
  • -O vmdk: Specifies the output format (vmdk).

Converting VDI to VMDK

If your VirtualBox VM uses native .vdi disks:

qemu-img convert -f vdi -O vmdk -o subformat=monolithicSparse virtualbox_disk.vdi vmware_disk.vmdk

Method 2: Using VBoxManage

If VirtualBox is already installed on your host, you can convert .vdi files directly without installing additional utilities:

VBoxManage clonehd "source_disk.vdi" "target_disk.vmdk" --format VMDK --variant Standard

Once the conversion finishes, attach the newly created .vmdk file to your VMware virtual machine configuration.